Few Canadian parents are elated when their child decides on a career in the movie business. Mina Shum’s certainly weren’t. They fled China for Hong Kong then immigrated to Canada in search of a better life for their children – university education, a solid, well-paying job – and were horrified that their daughter would plan her life around a career that had as much chance for success as winning the Lotto 6/49 jackpot.

But at 28, with her first feature film, Double Happiness, the darling of festival audiences and media alike, young Vancouver director Mina Shum appears poised to win the career sweepstakes – much to her parent’s surprise.

After being turned down twice to study film at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Shum enrolled in ubc’s theater program in 1983. But she had her heart set on film, and in 1988, was finally accepted into the film program.

‘In theater,’ she says, ‘you create an artificial world in which the audience must suspend their disbelief – it’s a simulation of reality – whereas in film you turn out the lights and absorb your audience into a different world. That seemed easier to me.’ She now laughs at her naivete.

Shum got her break during her first year in film school, working as an ad on director John Pozer’s low-budget feature The Grocer’s Wife and on Anne-Marie Fleming’s short film New Shoes.

She knew experience was a ticket into the industry, but was determined to direct her own films. So in her last year of school she applied for a Canada Council Explorations Grant. Much to her surprise, she got it. The money allowed her to move from graduation directly into developing her own projects.

‘Ever since then,’ she says, ‘I’ve been applying for grants, living like a student and making `little Mina movies’ as my friends call them. I was lucky, I never got into that $10,000 Gold Card bracket. And I’ve never been dependent on a salary.’

Her first film was a 20-minute documentary, Me Mom And Mona, about the lies the women in her family told her father in order to live their own lives. It picked up an Special Jury honorable mention at the 1993 Toronto International Film Festival.

She followed that by winning New Views III, a competition jointly sponsored by British Columbia Film, Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board Pacific Office that funds 100% of an up-and-coming local director’s first low-budget feature film.

The film was to be Double Happiness. The script, about a dutiful young Chinese woman struggling to coalesce her life between her traditional Chinese family and the contemporary Western world she’s grown up in, was autobiographical.

‘The biggest challenge for me,’ she says, ‘was learning how to write a good screenplay.’ She credits story editor Dennis Foon for teaching her the fine art of story structure.

‘Dennis became a fine-tuning instrument who helped filter through 28 years of living to find what was important to get my story out.

‘It wasn’t that I wanted to do an autobiography – at 28, how presumptuous! But I did want to tell the story of first love and first breakup, and that’s usually with your family. I knew what images impacted on me when that happened,’ she says.

‘I just decided to scribble from real life because that was easy, especially when you’ve got something so strange to work from like a Chinese immigrant family. You can’t get that much more dysfunctional and conflict-oriented. Dysfunctional families happen because something disruptive or intensely traumatic happens to them. And you can’t get a more traumatic experience than immigrating,’ says Shum.

‘I like to investigate relationships between people as a microcosm of larger social issues,’ she says. ‘In Double Happiness, the whole film revolves around how people relate to each other. Where I’m strong is in the drama, knowing how people feel and speak.

‘So if I can take a relationship and dissect it and celebrate the real-life likeness of a relationship – that’s what I would like to achieve with my films.

‘Every time I make a film I’m posing a question to myself. In this case, it was how do we find double happiness? Well, I don’t find the answer in the film.’

As for the question of being an ethnic woman working in film, Shum says, ‘I’ve never been anything else so I wouldn’t know the contrast. The one thing I do know is how important it is to be independent. That’s something my mother taught me, and that really helps me working in film. I learned very early on never to take no for an answer.’

She says being an immigrant to Canada also helped. ‘I had no fear of failure because I had nothing to lose. I always think that if I exist here at all in Canada, having learned how to put sentences in English together, why shouldn’t I be able to be anything I want. It’s a miracle we’re here as it is. So for me making films was not so much of a leap. It’s the history of oppression that my family had to deal with that I will not take. I will persevere and continue on.

‘My films are not perfect, and Double Happiness isn’t perfect either, but I’m learning and getting better. I just want to be really good someday. Double Happiness is very good for what it is. I’m thrilled with it, so my next film will be something different,’ says Shum.

That something different is a script entitled Fatale, which she describes as ‘a bank heist gone wrong, a film noir about a woman’s ability to reinvent herself in the ’90s.’

It’s the story of a love triangle between the bank robber, the woman he holds hostage and her lover, and how all of them want love but none of them can ask for it.

‘I used the bank heist genre,’ says Shum, ‘because I really like math and bank heists are usually a mathematical equation. I wanted to take it and put my own spin on it. I just don’t want to do Double Happiness II.’